code meets music

Put them in shiny boxes. And by shiny, I don’t mean metallic or reflective, just something that is going to make people go ‘ooh’ and talk about. Exactly as I’m doing now, with an album sleeve that you can make into a little Dolls House. The artist is Vonnegut Dollhouse, and they don’t sound half bad. The album doesn’t seem to be available yet, the group’s MySpace Page suggests CD Baby will be selling it ‘soon’.

I found the pictures via The Serif , they seem to have got them from Rethink Communications but that doesn’t seem to let me link directly to it…

The most distinctive album on my CD shelves is probably The Lost Riots by Hope of the States. As an album it was good, but the packaging was something else. The album comes in a sealed black cardboard sleeve, the same width as a standard CD case, but about twice as long. It was a shame to open it, and I imagine many didn’t, but once the perforated flap was ripped open, there is a smaller, CD-sized wallet containing the CD itself, and a chunky cardboard booklet, held together by a piece of string through the top-left corner containing the song lyrics, superimposed on annotated colour sketches of the internals of the human body.

What’s the most interesting album in your collection?

White Chalk did arrive, and I was a tiny bit disappointed. It’s a nice album, a little haunting but quite relaxing but lacks the power of PJ Harvey’s earlier stuff.

After seeing Go! Team live (again), I got their second album Proof of Youth and it’s pretty good. Not as surprising as the first, and I still think they’re best live (a lot seem to disagree) but it carries on the sample-driven, brass-powered, catchy tradition of Thunder Lightening Strike.

Supporting Go! Team were Operator Please, who are pretty darn good. “Just a song about Ping Pong” has been getting a bit of radio-play, and there’s meant to be an album in November, so I’m looking forward to that.

The Klaxons and New Young Pony Club are both described along the lines “the epitomy of so-called new-rave, though they’d be the first to deny it” and while the former jumped out at me right away as being a band worth listening to, I remember looking up NYPC and not being particularly impressed. When they were nominated for this year’s Mercury prize, I decided to reconsider and their album joined the many others that sit in my amazon basket waiting for me to feel like some new music. Their turn came a couple of weeks ago (My Machine wasn’t enough on its own to get me free shipping!) and I’m quite pleased I got it. “Hiding on the Staircase” and “Jerk Me” are really good, the rest of the album is quirky and catchy enough to be a good listen.

I think I’ve written here before about how awesome the Rough Trade Shops ‘Counter Culture’ albums are. At the beginning of each year since 2003 they’ve released a double-CD compilation containing what the staff consider to be the best of the previous year’s music. Counter Culture 2005 contained on it a song called ‘My Machine’ by the artist Princess Superstar. I liked it a lot and as a result found a few other songs from the album, which were also pretty cool. I finally got around to buying the album, and it’s really, really good. A definite mixture of dance, electronica, indie/rock and hip-hop, it’s an album that should appeal to a lot of people.

The 25 tracks tell the story of a future world where there is only one celebrity- Superstar, her having taken over the world with a number of clones, or ‘duplicants’- where children are taught to speak (they ordinarily telepath), through the medium of rap. It’s probably the most amusing album I’ve listened to (“Quitting Smoking Song” is hilarious) but also really easy to listen to; the songs are so different from one another, but all are fast-paced and catchy.

My Machine is the highlight of the album, but I’m so Out of Control, 10000 Hits and Sex, Drugs & Drugs are well worth listening to.

The email with download instructions arrived on Wednesday just like they said it would, and I’m quite pleased with the result- it’s a pretty good album.

Definitely a departure from Hail To The Thief (my least favourite Radiohead album) and heading back towards Kid A (my 2nd favourite).

There really is no excuse not to give it a listen, as if you really, really want it to be, it can be got (legally!) for free.

Only 6 weeks or so until the box arrives :)

So, Radiohead are releasing a new album then, with 10 days notice. The download-version comes out on their own site on October 10th, with a ‘discbox’ full of shiny extras available on December 3rd.

Order here

(via: Kottke)

Play.com have let me down. I pre-ordered the wonderful PJ Harvey’s new (probably wonderful) new album from them, and despite them having apparently dispatched it last saturday, it still hasn’t arrived. I don’t think I’ve been looking forward to an album this much since, well, forever really.

Anyway, after being much impressed by MIA’s first album ‘Arular’ (I even went so far call my computer ‘arular’), buying the 2nd album a couple of months ago wasn’t a difficult decision.

It’s not quite as exciting as when I first heard Bucky Done Gun off the first album- the songs this time seem to have been written slightly more with an audience in mind. That’s not to say she has toned down, but the songs are less political and more personal. It doesn’t take a psychologist to read something into the fact that Arular is the name of MIA’s “Tamil activist-turned militant” father (Wikipedia’s choice of description…) while Kala is named after her mother.

Hopefully White Chalk will arrive soon.

I bought quite a few new, and as it turned out rather good, albums last month. In brief:

Favourite Worse Nightmare (Arctic Monkeys)

Better lyrically than the first, but not quite as exciting. Brianstorm (the first single) is pretty good, but the standout track is Old Yellow Bricks- it’s pretty absorbing. If you didn’t like the first album, then probably not a good choice, but if the only thing putting you off the band is the hype, then you’d be missing out by not giving this album a chance.

The Looks (MSTRKRFT)

One of the guys from Death From Above 1979 doing electronic-dance-punk. It’s not my typical guitar-indie, but it’s a lot of fun, with some really catchy songs. Street Justice is pretty good, as is the album’s title track, with the remix giving a different, but also good, take on the song.

Sound of Silver (LCD Soundsystem)

This is more coherent than the debut, but I don’t see that as a good thing. It’s still good, but not quite as funky as the previous offering. It’s perhaps an unfair comparison, as the first album came with an extra CD of particularly good songs previously made by the artist, but it’s just a bit too polished. The single, North American Scum is good, and “New York I love you, but you’re bringing me down” gives the album a great ending.

The Reminder (Feist)

I’d never heard this singer before buying this album, but a newspaper review and the fact she sings/sung with Broken Social Scene is enough of a reccomendation. Her voice isn’t quite as amazing as Emily Haines (also of BSS, and with Metric) but it’s still good, in a relaxing but haunting kind of way. “My Moon My Man” is the best song on the album, Sealion and Honey Honey (the album and live versions) are also worth a listen.

Dr Heckle and Mr Jive (Pigbag)

I had Sunny Day by this band on the Rough Trade Post Punk compilation and liked it, so bought the album. I’m not entirely sure jazz afficianados would include them in their definitions, but the band describe themselves as ‘Jazz-revival’, and do a pretty good job of briding the pretty massive gap between Jazz and Punk. Sunny Day is probably the best track on the album, but as a whole, it is certainly catchy, and pretty different to the other music I listen to.

This album is rather wonderful. I was expecting nothing less, Silent Alarm was my favourite album of 2005, but follow-ups to brilliant debuts have, in the past, dissapointed me.

A lot of people I’ve spoken to about the album don’t think it’s as good as the previous one. I’m not so sure. In Song For Clay (Dissapear Here), the band/producers certainly picked a good opener, beginning with sombre, tranquil vocals over a soft melody, before the warning-siren guitar solo, and the introduction of a drum beat brings the song up to its anthemic peak-sound.

Hunting for Witches, the 2nd track on the album is, for me, the absolute highlight. Beginning with a mix of samples and a videogame-like riff, the song very quickly encourages foot- and finger-tapping. The lyrics of the song carry a pretty straight-forward message regarding the irrationality of parts of the media (and the population) in the aftermath of terrorist incidents, and towards the ‘war on terror’, but the style is far more subtle than a lot of ‘fuck the war’ songs released in the past few years.

I’ve uploaded a copy of the song for you to sample: hunting_for_witches.mp3

Other standout tracks on the album are The Prayer and Uniform; both benefiting from solid backing vocals, but in quiet different ways. The Prayer is powerful from the outset, with a rather unnerving humming joining the initial drumbeat, and being itself joined by Kele’s amazing voice. When I first heard Uniform I wasn’t so sure about it fitting with the rest of the album. The lyrics seemed to lack the subtlety of the other songs with the call-response and duets in the middle of the song being quiet different from the rest of the album, where Kele is most definitely in the spotlight on his own. The more I’ve listened to it this week, the more it’s grown on me, as a way of breaking up the album, and really helping to make the songs that follow it stand out a little more.

So, after the first album review (I think that’s a bit too generous a term…) comes the roundup of the year’s best albums, in my humble opinion naturally. Due to some patchy internet connectivity before Christmas I didn’t get a chance to finish writing the entry back then, so it’s here now. Imagine it was written before Christmas.

So, to start with, my 10 favourite albums of 2006. I think the list in its entirety is more important than the particular ordering; I find it very difficult to compare music directly in such a way…

Read the rest of this entry

I bought ‘Raise the alarm’ by The Sunshine Underground last week, and I rather like it. So much so that it finds itself the subject of a mini review.

It was reccomended to me on Amazon because I’d previously bought CSS’s self-titled debut and as I was buying some christmas presents anyway, it meant I got free postage.

Commercial Breakdown is the anthemic highlight of the album, but with a sound that in places owes a lot to The Rapture, in others could be mistaken for The Mystery Jets and overall has a definite ‘Madchester’ twang.

8/10

I decided to start a blog, this is it.

This guy writes interesting things about javascript and I noticed a while ago that he’d switched to a new blog system. It’s called Mephisto and runs on Rails which meant finding somewhere to host it was a little tricky, but then I remembered I’d seen a post on this guy’s blog about a voucher to get money off hosting with these guys which includes the domain name,insane amounts of disk-space and bandwidth, and costs me the grand sum of about £1 a month. Thanks.

Setting up mephisto on dreamhost’s servers wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, but with help from here, here and here I finally got it sorted.

For my job, and often in my spare time as well, I work on developing web applications. PHP is the tool of choice on the server but I’ve been spending more and more time recently doing interesting things with javascript. I plan on sharing my discoveries with the world…

While I code, and most of the rest of the time, I listen to music. I like a lot of bands, not focussed on an individual genre but pretty much encompassed by ‘indie’. My introductions to music came mainly from the manic street preachers and nirvana (not the happiest or most optimistic of people…) whereas now I’ve been listening a lot to the wave of ‘electro-funk’ and ‘indietronica’ (other people’s labels, not particularly mine…) that seems to be sweeping through- bands such as Cansei De Ser Sexy, Hot Chip and Clor. I also have a bit of a thing for the powerful, bluesy rock of people like PJ Harvey, The Kills and The Dresden Dolls and for the bordering-on-riot-grrl sounds of Sleater Kinney. My favourite album of this year though is the self-titled debut from Forward, Russia which with its weirdly named tracks (they’re all numbers, though not in sequence) and repetition between songs (it’s definitely an album to listen to uninterrupted, in its entirety) is certainly quirky. The record I’m most looking forward to next year is the second album from Bloc Party (possibly called ‘A Weekend in the City’…though I might have just made that up) which from what I’ve heard so far, could be better than their debut.